Tasmania: Hunting the fabled Tasmanian tiger

Tim Robey keeps an eye out for the elusive Tasmanian tiger, whose spectre
haunts the fascinating Australian state.

Not five hours after landing in Tasmania, I was face to face with a thing called a thylacine. This notorious marsupial, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, and technically as Thylacinus cynocephalus (“Dog-headed pouch dog”) was once unique to Australia’s offshore state. Now it’s supposedly extinct, though you’ll get a different opinion on that from every one of the island’s half a million citizens.

Surviving black-and-white video footage of the Tassie tiger makes recognising one straightforward enough. I would describe it as part dog, part hyena: a loping, ginger-furred carnivore with a wide yawn, long tail and dark stripes down its back.

Scientists believe the last example of the species died in captivity, at Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart, in 1936. Veterans of the bush claim otherwise: many old-timers will take you aside, put on a fittingly sober expression, and tell you they have actually seen one. What are the odds of a stray British film critic joining their ranks on his first visit to Tasmania (actually my first to Australasia altogether)? Infinitesimal, really.

I’ll come clean: it was stuffed. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, or TMAG, keeps several thylacine pelts, two adult skeletons and a set of pouched young in a small vault downstairs.

Their frozen gait and marble eyes give off an especially eerie vibe because of the question mark still wobbling over the species’ existence, and the strange nexus of political and cultural forces that keeps this debate raging.

Time and again on the island you can touch on the tiger issue and a flood of stories will pour forth – night-time sightings, assaults on terrified dogs, inexplicable poo. Tasmanians have a guilt-tinged sense of ownership when it comes to the tiger – they more or less hunted it to oblivion in the 19th century – but I was quickly wondering if they truly possess this four-legged spectre from history, or if it possesses them.

A locally shot film lured me over here – Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter, which I’d reviewed and greatly liked, not just for its dark scenic beauty but the sense of secrets in the wild, and a community fighting to keep them undisclosed. Willem Dafoe’s character is a morally ambivalent mercenary hired to track a recently sighted thylacine and capture it for cloning.

Might this happen? The movie, based on Julia Leigh’s controversial 1999 novel, questions whether we would necessarily want it to, but the battles it enacts between conservation and human profit are relevant in daily ways around here – bar brawls between “greenies” (environmentalists) and loggers fighting for their livelihood are a common occurrence in the sticks, hardly the examples of sketchy dramatic licence I’d assumed.

Meanwhile, supposedly ideal thylacine habitat isn’t hard to find within an hour or two of Tasmania’s towns. After Alaska, it contains the world’s second-largest area of temperate rainforest. There are trees here, mighty Huon pines, five times the age of the island’s oldest building (it was settled as a prison colony in the early 1800s).

The southern city of Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, is home to slightly less than half its population (210,000) – the next biggest is Launceston (80,000) in the north-east.

The former is a working port at heart, nestling, squat and anemone-like, in a tight niche between the Derwent river estuary and the 4,200ft-high Mount Wellington, which is a popular picnic spot you can drive up in half an hour. Hobart is also the first and last destination for anyone’s visit to Tasmania, a thriving student city with a panoply of waterfront bars, some great restaurants, and a select but growing number of boutique hotels.

If there’s one place that has put Hobart on the map lately – and on the map it most certainly is, featuring among Lonely Planet’s top 10 most attractive cities to visit for 2013 – it’s the Museum of Old and New Art, a weird and wonderful establishment built deep down in the sandstone rock of a peninsula just upriver.

The $180 million pet project of David Walsh, a radical philanthropist-collector and reclusive local celebrity, MONA is a gallery like no other. You descend into its massive bowels to be confronted with art in a raw, undigested state that’s intentionally crass, highly Australian, overwhelming and liberating in about equal measure. Nothing is captioned. For information, you must look to your O device, an iPod-style curatorial accessory that logs what you’re looking at, and gives you options to “Love it” or “Hate it”.

The most frequently loved piece is Julius Popp’s Bit.fall, a logistically dazzling water installation that spells out all the day’s most popular Google search terms in synchronised droplets. The most hated (but it’s also another of the most loved) is Cloaca, by Wim Delvoye, a smelly simulacrum of the entire human digestive system in connected, temperature-controlled flasks. I was there for its lunch, a meat-and-two-veg dish administered by a chirpy attendant in a lab coat, but perhaps mercifully missed the ceremony at the other end of the day.

An autodidact and polymath par excellence, Walsh made his millions gambling, and has spent them not only acquiring this world-class collection – it includes work by Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Chris Ofili – but building a labyrinthine exhibition space you can wander around for hours without reaching that familiar threshold of museum overload.

Beyond the museum itself, you’ll find a vineyard and microbrewery, a fine restaurant, and the MONA Pavilions, eight state-of-the-art residences each named after an Australian artist or architect.

Walsh remains a restless overseer of his riches, yanking down pieces that threaten to become star attractions at the expense of others, and chats intently over a beer about the various ways he wants to continue blowing raspberries at art-world preciousness and barriers to mass consumption.

MONA is the conceptual opposite of an ivory tower – it’s a dugout for the rest of us, with an aura of both fun and danger. My local contacts are amazed when I tell them its mastermind stopped by for half an hour – “That never happens,” I’m informed. They make a sighting of David Walsh sound as rare as a thylacine, or at least a duck-billed platypus.

In the farther-flung reaches of Tasmania, the island’s most famous living residents, distant relatives of the tigers, have their own extinction threat to contend with. The Tasmanian devil population has fallen by 85 per cent in the past 16 years, because of the ravages of a condition called devil facial tumour disease (DFTD), which seems to be without cure.

The result of a persistent genetic mutation and generations of inbreeding, this nasty face cancer has made their protection a major environmental crusade, but signs of region-specific immunity have fostered some cause for optimism among the experts. There’s a must-visit sanctuary in the foothills of Cradle Mountain where you can watch devils being fed and even pet one, but listening to the critters cackle insults at each other before their brutally powerful gnashers get to work on a carcass, it’s not hugely tempting to approach the front end.

Tasmania presents a wildlife experience to take the breath away, if you have the right guide. The Tarkine area in the north-west offers a forest camping package, Tarkine Trails, with walks among some of the tallest trees in creation. It’s easy to lose track of time before the dawn reveille of kookaburras whooping outside your tent.

A more extravagant option is Pepper Bush Adventures, north-east of Launceston, where Craig Williams, an outdoorsman-connoisseur, will sit you down to a sumptuous smorgasbord of local food – save some space for wallaby steak, meltingly lean and fried in front of you – in the middle of nowhere. As dusk falls and a haze of pinot noir threatens to descend, dozens of wombats, wallabies, possums, the rare-ish quolls (a cousin of the devil) and pademelons creep out for their day’s feed, faintly bemused to be overseen but generally just going about their business. You could spend all day at most zoos and see less fauna.

Human history doesn’t get missed out of the equation, either. The prison settlement of Port Arthur, a couple of hours’ drive south-east of Hobart, was Tasmania’s biggest tourist attraction pre-MONA. It’s one thing exploring the cells and lunatic asylum by day, quite another by night, where the site has recently added a high-tech “paranormal tour” to its popular “ghost tour”. It doesn’t take much suggestibility to find the creaky recesses of the old warden’s residence less than inviting without a light on.

Port Arthur is also an embarkation point for some excellent cruises around that tip of Tasmania. Over to the west, the lovely port village of Strahan (pronounced “Strawn”) offers ferry trips up the Gordon river and stop-offs at long-deserted island penal colonies.

The lure of Tassie is at least partly its status off the beaten track: visitors rarely incorporate it into their first visit down under. Still, it’s an increasingly tempting stand-alone destination, and one with a firm, even bullish sense of its own identity.

If the thylacine’s still out there, as so many swear, you get the sense it’s protected by a conspiracy of silence about its exact whereabouts: this is one way of explaining how rumoured sightings tend to blur and dissipate when you get down to specifics.

Col Bailey, a confirmed believer and the author of a book called Tiger Tales, talks of an encounter he has kept secret for two decades, even from his wife, to prevent media scrutiny from chasing the species even further into oblivion. On the other side, you’ll hear accusations of wishful thinking, delusion and plain sensory error bandied about with a shrug, but the believers don’t seem to care: “I know what I saw” is a declaration I heard more than once. If you don’t mind defying those slimmer-than-slim odds, this fabled creature is just the topmost of many reasons to keep your eyes peeled.

Tim Robey was a guest of Turquoise Holidays (01494 678400; turquoiseholidays.co.uk). It offers a 14-night self-drive holiday to Tasmania, including accommodation, car hire and return flight from Heathrow to Hobart, from £2,595 per person sharing.

The Source at MONA, in Hobart, has tasting menus of from three to nine courses, and one of Australia’s best and friendliest sommeliers (6277 9904; mona.net.au).

What to see and do

Visit TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; tmag.tas.gov.au) in Hobart for a fantastic insight into Tasmania’s early and natural history, including the thylacine. Admission free.

Don’t miss a trip to MONA (Museum of Old and New Art; mona.net.au), Australia’s must-visit cultural experience. Admission £13.

Paranormal Investigations at the Port Arthur Historic Site (portarthur.org.au) take place on the last Saturday of every month between 10pm and 2am. From £88; adults only.

Walk with Tarkine Trails (tarkinetrails.com.au) into the heart of the last major tract of temperate rainforest left on the planet. A two-night, three-day guided walk from £880 per person, all-inclusive.